Sorry for the delay.   Life is like that.    Hopefully I haven’t left anyone with a half-useful OSX MSI wind.  :)

At this point, you should have an MSI wind running OSX, but it’s probably not quite useful yet.   It should be working, but you may be running an older version of 10.5.    When I did this, I ended up running 10.5.2, at a point when 10.5.5 was current.    As a general rule, on non-Apple hardware, you don’t want auto-update running.    This is very true on the MSI Wind, since an auto-update could render your machine difficult to use.

For my updates, I’ve lived under the “let someone else do it first” philosophy.    By checking the web, I can see where people have had problems, and then react accordingly.   As things were, I was able to upgrade from 10.5.2 to 10.5.5 without much issue.   There are some hacked patches and ktexts that sometimes get overwritten.    Paul’s MSI Wind Driver Utility Pack (found here. After doing an OS upgrade, in theory, running the utilities in this distribution should get your machine back to a usable state. Make sure you have the utility pack on your compute before you do the upgrade, of course.

You may run into occasional pains. For instance, in upgrading from 10.5.5 to 10.5.6, some of the standard patches seem to both make the built-in keyboard and the display suddenly cease to function. This isn’t a problem if you know enough to have a USB keyboard and an external monitor handy. Otherwise, you could be very sad.

Paul has a very good write-up on doing the upgrade, as well as using his tools. on his site.

I should note that there are two changes I had to make to my MSI wind to tailor it to my liking.

The first is that I wanted more memory. One gigabyte just doesn’t cut it for me these days, and two gigabytes is the low end of useful, normally. Since I’m intending to use this as a portable computer, and not an everyday computer, I don’t think I’ll be placing as much strain on it as I would on my desktop. Since the MSI Wind supports 2 gigabytes, I opted to do the upgrade. It was a relatively simple, but warranty-voiding, matter of removing several screws on the bottom of the case, and putting in a chip. If you’re not comfortable voiding your warranty, you shouldn’t do this. If you’re mildly technically competent, and willing to take the risk, it’s easy to do. Fortunately for me, I had a PC2-6400 1GB SODIMM lying around. This doesn’t exactly match the memory in the MSI Wind, but it does work, and hasn’t been problematic. The default memory is slower than that, and thought he laptop can use PC2-6400, I doubt it’s taking advantage of the faster speed.

Note that the onboard memory on the Wind is actually onboard. You don’t need to remove any memory to add new memory, you just add it. The word out there is that the Wind will only support a maximum of 2GB, so buying anything larger than a 1GB SODIMM is wasted money, I suspect. However, if anyone out there has put in a larger SODIMM and gotten more memory, I’d love to hear about it.

The other configuration change I had to make was to the WiFi network card. The default WiFi card that comes with the Wind is not supported under OSX by default. At the time that I set up my Wind, the acceptable practice was to remove the standard card, and install a 3rd party card with a chipset that is supported. The Dell DW-1390 and DW-1490 both have supported broadcom chips. At the time I was purchasing, the only difference I could find between those two cards was about $15. I got a DW-1390 off of ebay for $12. Installing the card was easy, though there was a small modification to the motherboard that needs to be made: There is a small mounting nut that is soldered onto the motherboard, which doesn’t interfere with the default card, but doesn’t quite fit with the DW-1390. It was very easy to heat the nut with a soldering iron, and pull it off. Other sites suggest that you can just wiggle it off, but I’d recommend against that, especially since you’ve just voided the warranty. Applying a soldering iron to the nut and heating it just enough to loosen the solder made pulling it off the motherboard with a small set of needlenose pliers a trivial move. If you need to go this route, do it carefully and properly.

A bit after I replaced my network card, Realtek provided a drop-in driver for the WiFi card that is in the Wind. By all accounts that I’ve read, this approach “just works” and is an easy install. I believe the Realtek card is 802.11 B/G/N, whereas the Dell cards are just B & G, so there is a bit of an advantage to just adding the driver. I occasionally consider putting the default card back in, but I just haven’t gotten around to it.

Adding the memory and swapping the WiFi card was very quick and easy. I believe that doing both took me less than 10 minutes, and some amount of that 10 minutes involved me getting my soldering iron and waiting for it to warm up. The insides of the MSI wind are very easy to get to, and these specific parts are straightforward and accessible. Some of the other modifications out there, such as modifying the mouse buttons, or replacing the touchpad, will take more time and effort. I may do them at some point, but for now, I just wanted a basic laptop.

With the firmware installed, I’d been gearing up for how to actually install the OS.

First off, I should mention that, for odd reasons, I had a legitimate copy of Leopard that wasn’t going to use. If you’re doing this install, I recommend that you also obtain a legitimate copy of OSX Leopard. Apple sells it for $129, or you can get it here for $109, with free shipping. I’m not sure about the “New and Used” versions for $80, but you may decide to take the risk.

Having acquired a legitimate version of OSX, you’re now going to put it on the shelf. Search your favorite bittorrent site for a distribution called MSIOSX86.iso. This is a version of OSX that has already been modified to include the drivers necessary to make the MSI Wind run nicely on this hardware. The version I installed was based on OS X 10.5.2, and it may have been upgraded by now. There are ways to get your release upgraded to a current version. Right now, it’s all about having a starting point, and I’ll try to cover the upgrade at a later point.

Many people took to burning the OS image onto DVD, and booting from an external DVD drive. Not having one, and not wanting to spend $60 for one, I looked for other options. The best option I found was very similar to what I found for the firmware: Burn the ISO to a USB flashdrive, and boot from there. I found a great set of instructions on how to do that on Dan Cameron’s site.

The short form of what you’re doing to get OSX on to the drive in a bootable manner is to mount the ISO image as a file system. You then use Disk Utility to “restore” that image onto the USB drive. That will result in a USB drive that is (or should be) bootable on Apple Hardware. However, since you’re not using Apple hardware, you need to do a little extra work, which is not mentioned on Dan’s site. To make the drive bootable, you need to use Chameleon, which is one of the tools you can find at the OSx86tools site. Chameleon does all the appropriate magic for non-apple hardware to boot off the USB drive.

Now it’s just a small matter of booting off the USB drive and installing OSX. First, with the machine powered off, install the bootable USB drive. When the Wind powers up, go into the BIOS settings and tell the machine to boot off the USB drive as it’s first option, and save the bios settings. When the machine restarts, it should see the USB drive, boot off of it, and bring you up ready to install. At this point, it’s a normal OSX Leopard installation, and you proceed as you normally would.

I should note that my goal was to have a netbook running OSX. There are people out there who have set up their Wind to triple boot OSX, Ubuntu, and Windows XP. I considered this for a while, and then realized that OSX would really be the only OS to get used. I rarely need a windows box, and I have plenty of other Ubuntu resources generally available to me. It’s nice to have that option available though. If you’re interested in that, a simple websearch should lead you to someplace useful.

Assuming you’ve gotten your MSI Wind, the first thing that you’re going to want to do is to upgrade the firmware. My MSI Wind came with version 1.06 of the firmware, which is a bit older than the current. The current firmware is 1.10 (or 1.0B) and can be found here.

I did things a bit backwards, and just dove in on installing OSX. When I decided that I should upgrade the firmware, I had a bit of a problem. The firmware upgrade procedure involves running a DOS utility that will re-flash the firmware, and in installing OSX on my Wind, I had erased the only real DOS machine I had available. Eventually, I was able to burn a bootable DOS image onto a 128Mb USB thumbdrive that I had around, put the firmware on there, boot off it, and install the firmware. I’m not a windows user at all, but I suspect that there is a way that you can boot into a basic windows command line interface, and do the upgrade from there. I leave it to the reader to figure out the best method for them, but I am now very happy to have a bootable USB drive already setup for the next time I have to do this.

At the time I did my install, I went from firmware 1.06 to 1.09, since that was the most recent at the time.. Some of the changes in the firmware have been noted to give the MSI Wind a ~30% speed boost. Another notable change is that you gain the ability to overclock the Wind anywhere from 8% to 24%, simply by pressing Function + F10.
“Simply” is slightly misleading here. You do have to do a little setup in the BIOS, and pre-determine how fast you want to overclock. You have the option of 8%, 15%, or 24%.
Once you select it in the BIOS, you boot into your OS, and then when you press Function + F10, you get overclocked to the rate you’ve set in the BIOS. This is handy for seeing if your machine can handle the overclock. If it can’t, you can back out of it very easily.

I’m not running my Wind overclocked. I couldn’t tell any notable difference for my computer, and generally I want more memory instead of more CPU. Other people seem happy with the ability though.

For a while, I’ve found netbooks to be interesting items. I’d watched for a while, but they only became interesting when people started making OSX run on them.
Back in December, I purchased an MSI Wind off of Ebay, with the intent of making it a very portable and very inexpensive OSX box. I’d had an extra copy of OSX 10.5 (Tiger) and this was a fine way to put it to good use.

On the whole, the netbook behaves as I’d like, with a few little quirks. There is a webcam, but it’s activated through a hotkey sequence, not directly via software. Bluetooth is much the same. Audio does work, but switching from built-in speakers to the headphone jack (and back) requires a small shell script to be run. The touchpad is overly sensitive, and sometimes problematic. None of these are show stoppers for me, and the machine has many fine features: It’s small and light, yet still usable. It’s very easy to sleep, and it wakes from sleep very very fast. Performance-wise, it seems very similar to my old 1.67Ghz G4 powerbook. Whereas I had been pushing the limits of my powerbook, the MSI Wind doesn’t get as stressed, since I tend to use it in a much more limited way than I’d use the powerbook. One of the best features of the MSI Wind is that it’s cheap, and very hackable. I was surprised at how easy it was to get OSX up and running. Over the next several posts, I’ll detail the bits of knowledge I’ve gleaned from my experience.

Sadly, I didn’t get to see the dog and pony show that went with the announcements today.   When I was able to get back to a computer, I hit the apple.com website to see what the big releases were.

Looking over the new Macbook and Macbook Pro, so far I like them.   If they really mean it when they say 5 hours of battery life, then I’m very impressed, if not interested.    The LED backlit displays are supposed to be very nice, and I like the look of the new case.   Beyond that, there isn’t much to report.    It’s a little faster.   It’s got better graphics.   They both still only top out at 4GB of ram.    It’s a nice update, but not an earth-shattering one.

I have since had the chance to actually touch and play with one of the new macbooks, and I confess that I’m impressed.    I hadn’t previously be aware of the fact that there is no “traditional” mouse button any more.   It’s gone completely, and the touchpad is now much larger.   To “click” you simply press down where you normally would have pressed on the touchpad button.  The laptop is well built, nicely engineered, and really nice to look at.  The LED-lit screen is bright and crisp.   It’s noticeably lighter than the previous generation.  I’m also very impressed with the big boost in battery life, now allegedly around 5 hours.     But above all, as with many things Apple, it all just works.

Now if only they would update the mac mini!

I recently bought a brand new 24″ 3.06Ghz iMac.    In almost 20 years of working with technology, this is the first new computer that I have ever owned for myself.   I’ve owned more than my share of other computers, from a variety of Apple laptops to a stack of Sun workstations and servers.    They all serve their purpose, and they’ve all been worth the time put into them.   They were, however, all previously owned.    Spending money on a new iMac was a big deal, and more money than I’ve ever spent on a computer, new or used.   A variety of circumstances led to it though, and I decided to take the plunge.

That said, I bought one.    So far, I love it.   Why?   Glad you asked!  Here are a few reasons off the top of my head:

1. 4GB of memory.   Sure, I could get this on other boxes, but this is my first computer with this much memory.   It totally makes the difference.
2. Nice, crisp screen.   It’s very bright and nice to look at.
3. Speed is just not an issue.   Between 4GB of ram and lots of CPU, this box has yet to be slow.
4. Nicely made.   It all just fits together in ways that I like.
5. Rates nicely on power usage.   I’ll give it a reading on my kill-a-watt the next time I reboot.

As for things I don’t like:

1. Leopard.   Most of it is very nice.  Spaces often does the wrong thing, enough so that I’ve considered loading Tiger onto it.
2. Only 4GB of memory!  Clearly this goes both ways. 
3. The keyboard.   I gave up on it.   I’m using a white keyboard from an old G4 tower.   Much nicer, and more what I prefer.

After several months of using it, the iMac has yet to disappoint in any major way.   It’s been rock solid, and can do everything I like.   So far, I’m impressed, and I’ve evangelized to friends about it.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…